India CSR News Network
NEW DELHI: India’s leading healthcare company Dabur India Ltd has achieved of a milestone in its towards improving the sanitation standards in villages of Uttar Pradesh with one of the villages – Nagla Uday Rampur – achieving ‘Open Defecation Free’ status.
Dabur, along with its CSR arm SUNDESH, has helped construct household toilets in all Nagla Uday Rampur, ensuring that all 263 households today have individual toilets and the village is now free from open defecation.
A special function was organized at Nagla Uday Rampur village today where a specially designed cleaning kit was distributed to all households for regular maintenance of the toilets. Special training sessions have also been held for all households where the vilagers were educated about the need for using toilets and awareness generated about proper hand-wash post using toilets.
This is the second village under Dabur’s Sanitation programme – christened ‘700 Se 7 Kadam’ – to achieve the open Defecation Free status. With this, Dabur is now course to achieving its target of ensuring Open Defecation Free status for at least 5 villages and constructing 1,200 household toilets in the 2016-17 financial year.
A Sudhakar, CSR Head, Dabur India Ltd said, “At Dabur, we believe that an organization’s true worth lies beyond its business, and is best reflected by the service it renders to the community and the society. One of the major problems in villages is lack of sanitation facility and women are the major suffer from it. While keeping the thought in mind, we started a project for promoting sanitation with construction of household and school toilets and also run awareness campaign in schools and villages. Today, I am very happy to announce that we have made one village ‘Open Defecation Free’ in Uttar Pradesh under our ‘700 Se 7 Kadam’ initiative.”
Dabur’s ‘700 Se 7 Kadam’ initiative seeks to protect the dignity of women in rural India by bringing toilets closer to them. Women in rural India have to get up early and walk a long distance to relieve themselves. With no access to household toilets, they are forced to hold on to nature’s call during the day, resulting in health issues. Under this initiative, Dabur provided financial support for construction of household & school toilets in villages in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. This programme also sought to build a clean and hygienic environment through various awareness programs in schools, slums and public areas.
In the first phase of this programme, Dabur has selected 17 villages in district of Hapur & Gautam Budh Nagar (Uttar Pradesh), 6 villages in Rudrapur (Uttarakhand) & 3 villages in Baddi (Himachal Pradesh). In the financial year 2015-16, Dabur had supported construction of 1,048 household toilets in rural Ghaziabad, Rudrapur & Baddi.
“To ensure involvement and participation of the community members, we involved the women from the household in this project and payment cheques are given to the women, who are the big drivers of this initiative. The payments are linked to the construction and paid in two parts to ensure that the household is involved in constructing the toilet. Since toilets are constructed in the individual households, they are responsible for cleaning and maintenance of the toilets, making the project sustainable in the long run,” Sudhakar said.
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